


between love and cholera

by ghostwit



Category: One Piece
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, I feel like I need to edit this one quite a bit so. fair warning, Is that what this is? Sickfic?, M/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Canon, Sharing a Bed, Sickfic, Terminal Illnesses, lol, missing scenes plural really but like. loosely. ahah., oh yeah it's not a work of mine without, umm?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:56:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27285286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwit/pseuds/ghostwit
Summary: The first time Roger coughs himself breathless, Rayleigh is adrift, eyes narrowed and hands instantly shooting forward to catch his slumping captain, sliding palms beneath his shirt to feel the spasm of those sturdy ribs, so much Rayleigh’s keel around which he constructs himself--now quivering under his fingers.(Saccharine read, such a sentimental novel.Give you cavities if it doesn't drive you to the bottle.)
Relationships: Gol D. Roger/Silvers Rayleigh
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20
Collections: One Piece Bingo 2020/2021





	between love and cholera

**Author's Note:**

> Ch. 506: "It was a sickness no one could treat. Roger was in a lot of pain..."  
> "...but Crocus, the lighthouse caretaker...was able to lessen the pain. We begged him to come with us as ship physician on our final voyage."
> 
> Prompt: Missing Scene

The first time Roger coughs himself breathless, Rayleigh is adrift, eyes narrowed and hands instantly shooting forward to catch his slumping captain, sliding palms beneath his shirt to feel the spasm of those sturdy ribs, so much Rayleigh’s keel around which he constructs himself--now quivering under his fingers. 

“Roger? _Roger_ ,” Rayleigh holds him, shaking shoulders and shaking palms, “what’s _happening?_ ” He makes to wave his hand in dismissal, but a hack jerks him forward again until his breath comes damp and hard on Rayleigh’s shoulder, soaking his collar in an incongruous warmth. 

It's like tears, almost, but Roger never cries, especially not on the deck where Shanks is poring over a card game in the diamond of space between his and Buggy's legs, where Bankuro is grinning and flashing rings around spritely fingers to goad Momora into a loot trade. 

Spencer’s head snaps up, blonde and elegant, but the lean lines of his usually nonchalant mouth and cheek are crimped with worry, confusion. Langram’s spine straightens from beyond him, hair bouncing as he turns. 

“It’s nothing.” He speaks into Rayleigh's throat, scrapes his teeth along the column of skin presented--ribbed with cartilage and beautifully pale, he can’t help but marvel silently--before him in apology. 

“It’s _nothing_ , Roger?” Rayleigh’s eyes flash beneath the lenses with the hiss, one hand slipping out from beneath Roger’s rib to card through his hair in incredulity, “You’re falling against me on the deck and it’s nothing, _Captain?!”_

“Eh, ehehe, slow on the uptake, I’ve been falling for you this whole ti--” Rayleigh shoves him back with the hand still mooring him, watches him fall on his ass in a way with a yelp that would have been funny if not for the genuinely pained edge to the noise: like a kicked dog, heaving and sharp. 

"It's _nothing!?_ " 

The entire crew snaps to cautious attention at this, and Rayleigh's eyes flash again, deliberate and touched with the conqueror's will that he carefully threads around where Roger lays wincing, "Stand down." 

"Ah, geez," Gaban mutters, scratching at his scalp as he turns to the cabin boys slumping on the deck, “overkill, Vice.” Shanks' wide-eyed gaze flits about frantically as his head pounds in his skull while Buggy's out cold beside him, jokers and kings scattering between them and wicking away into the breeze, unsheltered. No enemy had yet to expose them to this, and the thought makes Rayleigh wince inwardly, having been their first inadvertent exercise in the crushing of will.

He yanks Roger to his feet roughly, sliding his forearm under his thighs as he stands to collapse him against his chest. His legs hang over and his head lolls forward with a wince, spasming his way into another coughing fit.

He’s deadweight in his arms, having to weigh somewhere over a ton, but it’s weight Rayleigh’s been carrying for years and something about the juddering motion of his frame scares him, almost, almost. “What _is_ this, you bastard?” he mutters, Roger still coughing wet against his collar, warm breath huffing over the stitching of the scar that stretches down from his shoulder. His frown deepens. 

He leverages the handle to their cabin open with an awkward twist of the elbow, kicking the door at the base with his toe and dropping Roger on the bed. He crosses the room, braces himself on the vanity with a twitching snarl, one hand mussing his hair in worry. His face flattens before his grimace lifts again at the corners, nose crumpling. The motion repeats, Rayleigh’s head spinning in want for a drink, worry, and then greater want for a drink to smother that worry with. Roger groans from the bed. 

  
  


“Ray?” he says, arms sprawling and legs curling to pull to his chest, and the words sound so damnably _breakable_ , hoarse on the end and quieted with pain and everything Roger _isn’t_ even when he’s staggering with a fatal wound spilling viscera over his abdomen, that Rayleigh can feel his world falling out from under his feet again, “Ray, _please_ , come--come here.” And, then, croaked out like a man on his deathbed, “Hurts.” 

His hands come up to his face, sliding down to smooth the pained crease of his brows and smear his tears along so they disperse into his skin. The anger coiling his gut tensions, snake-like, into something else, something _ugly_ with a childish fear that he’s far too smart for and everything in him _gives_. Or, maybe not, enough left for him to crawl into their bed with a weak smile gracing his lips, taking Roger in his arms and shaking with a repressed sob when the man honest to god _shivers_ against him, whimpering in his grip. 

“Hey, hey,” Rayleigh tries not to cry, strains his being against the tide of uncertainty that’s assailed him so violently, with such enmity in the wake of his captain’s illness that he finds himself reaching into parts of himself he’d thought buried. Since the first weeks of their voyage, decades ago now, he’d found himself buoyed on the devil’s luck, carried on his captain’s rising sun certainty--and now the planet is skewing, the star on the horizon is both violent and glaring and all too distant, splitting his vision like the white of a blade edge as it wavers into view from directions unknown. 

Most important, though, is Roger who feels small in his arms, nine feet tall and broad-chested and febrile and quivering, and so he doesn’t blame him, doesn’t let his anger and fear incense his tongue to smoke, but instead lets it soften in his mouth as he presses kisses to a sweat-sticky hairline, “I’ve got you, Captain.” 

The whimper he gets in turn as Roger turns slowly, slowly inward, with hammers pounding picks through his skull striking at every motion, makes Rayleigh’s heart flutter in his throat, fight back another sob, “I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise. I’m here, Roger.” 

Roger looses another quiet groan of pain, torn from him so easily, like he can't even muster the energy to fight the weakness in a traitorous body. Rayleigh steadies his shaking hands in the smoothing of his dark locks, back against his scalp and away from his face in a repetitive motion of silent prayer: _it's okay, it's okay_. 

He can feel the anxious energy of the crew as they mill about, an unguided afternoon of leisure turned sinister in the loss of their leadership, feels Gaban with his back to the door of their quarters and the flickering wills of the still-dizzy cabin boys trying to wheedle under his bracing arms in search of their captain. He can feel the fluttering expanding and narrowing of Roger's ribs as his breath staggers into sync, deep and slow even when it hitches on a painful breath. He lets his eyes slide shut.

Roger is laughing in his arms when he comes to sometime in the night, tucked impossibly against him and still bracketed in Rayleigh's lean arms, and for a second Rayleigh's face lights into a sly grin, until Roger tilts his head against his chest and goes, "Heh, did I make ya cry, Rayleigh?" 

Rayleigh starts, head jerking back and arms stiffening for a second and trying to slide himself free from Roger, something that makes the younger pout, inordinately childish on the face of a man well into his forties. Rayleigh relents with a scoff, tilting his chin away as Roger laughs against him, “How long have you known?”

“I, er, uh,” Roger’s head tilts, hair brushing soft on the column of Rayleigh’s throat and sending a pleasant shiver down his spine--even like this, to simply have each other is wonderful, a pleasure grown into second nature in their years together.

Rayleigh groans and Roger stammers, “I, I swear I was gonna tell ya! I just didn’t know wha’ it really was. Couldn’t’ve been more than a… month?” Rayleigh squawks, jaw dropping and exhale coming in an offended punch of breath.

“A week?” Roger tries, and Rayleigh brings his knee up between them to catch his captain in the gut with an _oof,_ curling inwards on reflex.

“You’re impossible!” Rayleigh barks, and Roger shelters his face in his throat again, stifling a cough. “Do you even know what it is now?” 

Roger shakes his head, like a guilty dog caught with something in its mouth, “Not really.” Elongates his _not_ and softens the bite of the _t_ for a whiny little _naaww_ noise. 

Rayleigh sighs, “We have to go to--” 

“We need to go back into the Grand Line.” 

Rayleigh’s not sure how he still has it in him to be surprised, but his eyes widen and he kicks Roger again, _hard_ , this time in the calf, “You’re fucking insane!”

Roger--after wincing, briefly and acutely--looks up with glittering eyes and laughs, pulls Rayleigh down by a fistful of strawberry blonde hair and kisses him until full lungs strain for air, “Ya knew that.” His smile is bright in the unlit cabin.

Rayleigh lifts one of the arms around the other’s shoulders to massage his temples and sigh, “I knew that.”

“There’s something there, Rayleigh…” Roger muses, leaning back in to press a kiss to below his wrist, muscle jumping under the touch as Rayleigh keeps pinching those circles into his forehead, “We’ve gotta go.”

He remembers Lodestar, doesn’t think he could forget. Remembers the poneglyphs along their passages, rising like portents of stone and hooking intrigue in malleable, hungry minds.

“I have heard the lighthouse keeper at Reverse Mountain runs a clinic.” Rayleigh mutters, shifting his hand to stroke down the side of Roger’s face instead, resigned. The man positively beams up at him, and after all these years something about it still makes Rayleigh’s face warm, throat tightening a touch. “We’re still gonna need to get it checked out in between, though,” Rayleigh’s grin is lazy and Roger huffs through his nose. 

* * *

The crew’s been resting on the unforgiving shores of the Twin Cape, dotted with brush that seems squeezed between the gaps of the sheer rock face, taking in the rather steep hospitality of the esoteric lighthouse keeper and fraternizing with the whale--big, but not too impressive on a repeat pass through the Grand Line--that skirts the docked Oro Jackson with excited figure eights. 

They’ve met before, same little whale, too, Rayleigh recalls--Roger grinning broadly as he questions the commitment of the other man and getting a long-practiced regale of the Rumbar Pirates’ stay on Twin Cape that had Roger sniffling and cooing--but not with such vulnerability. Not with Roger lurching from beneath his arm and in need of his services. It’s almost perfunctory, the way Rayleigh nudges him through clinic after clinic--and sometimes, not at all, Rayleigh coming in alone with nothing but a manilla folder and a worry line forming in his forehead as Roger sits, fuming in their cabin--in hopes of unprecedented skill, really, more than miracle. Anything more than a pensive pinch of the lip and a solemn shake of the head. _No more than six months. A year on heaven’s blessings._

There’s a sense of lightness to this meeting, though, their third now during their weeklong stay, Roger’s broad grin characterizing the shuck of his shirt, even as Rayleigh runs Crocus down another file of symptoms he’s probably heard enough to recite in his sleep. The lighthouse keeper waves his hand over his shoulder in a double flap of dismissal, back turned to Rayleigh as Roger stretches on the cot, yawning and grinning. Even on their first encounter, the doctor had done nothing but twist his lip and furrow his brow before ducking into a backroom. He’d returned with a white bottle of a bitter smelling syrup and a shrugged, “Just pay me good if that works any.”

Roger’s not coughed since then, all his swooning in Rayleigh’s arms done with a playful purpose, if a little mean-spirited for the way it makes him gasp his name in struck match concern. The crew has felt it, too, the levity even as they enter the former half of the world’s most treacherous sea, all of it inconsequential in the face of Gol D. Roger, who has the fates at his heels begging for scraps. 

He looks up to Roger, maybe not the picture of health, but maybe a verisimilitudinous portrait of, at the very least, with a liquid gaze, fuzzy on the edges with an overwhelming fondness. Roger shoots him a thumbs up, and Crocus grumbles as he pokes at the ridges of Roger’s ribs beneath the muscle of his abdomen. 

He knows this will work--or do something, at least, for Roger--needs that doctor with his ugly facial hair and incomprehensible haircut. Damn, he’ll even take the whale need be, swimming in tow with the Oro Jackson to swat away sea kings from the little guy if that’s what he demands in exchange for _keeping his captain alive._

Through his years, so long as Rayleigh’s had one, he’s kept his pride. He is no longer a drifting twenty-something, letting the wind carry him into whichever bosom and bottle he fancies, constructing his dignities around the captain so dependent on his guiding gaze, the crew, seeking order and meritorious hierarchy, his disciplining hand. 

“Join our crew.” This is not usually Rayleigh’s request to make, Roger’s intuition and simplicity unmatched in rooting out the kindred souls that would mesh well with the inculture of the Roger Pirates, and it would startle Roger if not for the circumstance. 

Rayleigh sinks to his knees without a second thought, forehead pressed to the ground, “We’ve circumnavigated the Grand Line once. We can do it again. If your people are out there, we’ll find them.” His breath is sharp, edged with a desperation he knows won’t do anything to offer him negotiating leverage, “please.” 

_(Roger, halfway through a story, dropping his drink so the mug splinters on the deck. Entire body seizing up in pain, phlegmy noises clawing past his teeth as Shanks, so young, looks on in alarm. Eyes pleading when he turns to Rayleigh. Rayleigh, afraid that the boy will see the same pleading in his own gaze.)_

Roger staggers on the cot, tries to rise, but Crocus raises a sturdy arm between the two of them. Rayleigh’s eyes widen, immediately bristling at the border between his captain and himself, scant as it may be, but he doesn’t lift his head--only his eyes--steadies the tremble in his bent elbows. Crocus’ gaze sharpens into something lethal and Rayleigh can nearly taste the protectiveness stirring under Roger’s skin through his haki, spilling from his consciousness and marking the room acutely with it. Roger starts on a word.

( _Roger, a leaf in the wind in their soundless cabin. Rayleigh letting him smother his whimpers against his chest, every pained breath taken right over the frantic heartbeat of his first mate.)_

“Please,” Rayleigh repeats, steadfast. 

“It’s not good habit to bow your head to a subordinate.” Crocus says with a sigh, wiping his hands and making for a cabinet hanging on the clinic wall, beginning to gather and tidy things. And then, in that blasé way of Crocus’ that Rayleigh becomes so familiar with in the coming years, “He has, at best, four years to live.” 

Roger hacks on the bed, grinning and throwing a second thumbs up. 

* * *

(“You hear that, Laboon? I’m gonna go find your boys.” Crocus hollers, rusty coastline stolid and familiar beneath sandaled feet, the whale in the water chirping and wriggling in glee enough to rustle the waterline. 

Roger laughs and hooks a jovial arm about the doctor’s shoulders, “Gonna find a lot more out there than your crew, Crocus! Wa ha ha! Tell this to your whale,” He guffaws, turning to face the crew as they load up, ants in a line passing crates of medical supplies and provisions, “We’re going out there and finding One Piece!”)

(Rayleigh watches, with the ocean glittering at Roger’s back to highlight his raised arm in stark relief, his captain proud and tall, rootless and sturdy in one. He thinks not of that juddering ribcage, that hoarse rasping of breath.)

**Author's Note:**

> Ehehe, I kind of stretched this prompt, huh? Usually I wouldn't consider pre-canon as "missing scene" but Rayleigh talking about it on Sabaody really made me feel like it was... feasible flashback material, at least? Let me know if it doesn't count and I'll write something else up for it, no problem! It's so nervewracking to do this, haha, feels like when you finish an exam early and you're waiting for someone else to go turn theirs in first so you can too without it being weird, haha. 
> 
> I really just wanted to write Rayleigh being emo over his captain in pain but it got away from me when I started thinking about them freaking out about Roger bowing his head and Rayleigh mentioning that he begged Crocus aboard ughrghhh jdhyjtsgdyh. 
> 
> Please feel free to leave a comment/concrit/whatever if you're up for it! Means a lot.
> 
> hazeism.tumblr.com


End file.
